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Analog Revival Means Vinyl Will Outlive CD
An anonymous reader writes "In the age of the iPod, an unlikely revival is taking place — kids are turning to 7" vinyl to get their kicks. Sales of 7" singles are apparently through the roof. Bands like the White Stripes are releasing thousands of new singles on the format, and record purchases have risen by over a million units in the last year — back to 1998 levels. NME told CNET: "it's very possible that the CD might become obsolete in an age of download music but the vinyl record will survive,". The article explains how indie kids are drawn to vinyl because "the tactile joy of owning a physical object that represents your attachment to a band is infinitely more enjoyable than entering a credit card number into iTunes.""
The stupidity of consumers is directly proportional to the perceived cool factor of the product.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
One thing I've missed with CDs is the smaller form factor has led to less inspired covers. Less Detail. Fewer painted covers. It's an art that faded away without nearly enough notice. Replacing cover art is most cases are vanity portraits of the artist or band, with poor photoshop work to tie into a marketing theme.
If vinyl makes a comeback, I hope new talent following the footsteop of Roger Dean take up this opportunity.
I guess the one thing that never goes out of style is blinding stupidity.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Funnypics
Vinyl has already outlived 8-tracks and cassettes. Why is it surprising that it will outlive CD?
Their opinions will change the momment they want to move out of their parent's house and have to carry boxes of vinyl up any number of flights of stairs.
See? Those RIAA people should have known that people still want to buy and own their media. The fact that MP3s are out there and are being passed about liberally is irrelevant to the fact that people want to buy and own. The reason for MP3 sharing, in my opinion, is partly convenience and partly to address the problem of scarcity and availability.
It's also nice to hear that the indy crowd is growing in force. It is about the only way, shy of legislation, to put the power back into the hands of the artists.
Thinking about that again -- that's a stupid question. We have an Internet nowadays...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Vinyl never really went anywhere. I'd been buying vinyl for the last 15 years. It's always been popular for the "underground" (how I hate that word) music culture. The only reason this is getting play at all is because the White Stripes, a former "underground" indie band, has hit it big and is just doing something that's always been done but is now in the public eye. No news here at all.
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
mod parent up!
saying vinyl is 'dead' is like saying apple is 'dead'. just because it has a smaller market share limited to fanatics and afficianadoes instead of the top-40 masses doesn't mean vinyl ever went anywhere.
here's news for all you computer geeks: there are music geeks too, and they think pretty much the same way. just think of 7" records as the audiophile version of the command line.
2 1337 4 u!
I've not seen those for years...and actually would like to get one to at some point, transfer a lot of my vinyl only stuff to digital.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Wait a minute. The fact that vinyl has many disadvantages does not imply that it is a completely inferior format. Problem is, a lot of "audiophile" airheads have no idea what they're talking about because they don't understand anything except "I paid $2000 for this turntable, therefore it must be better". Subsonics is a big point for me. If you have a decent setup or truly high quality headphones this does not go unnoticed and gives a certain atmosphere to records which I have not, to date, been able to reproduce with CDs. This is notable in the Dark Side of the Moon LP, as well as any jazz record with contrabass. And while people go all around claiming that a vinyl record is unable to reproduce many shapes of frequencies, the PCM encoding used in CDs is unable to either (neither can reproduce a square or sawtooth wave), so we can call it a toss-up. What matters most to me is the fact that the mastering of the time of vinyl is of much, MUCH higher quality than today's. Despite the higher noise floor of the vinyl medium, audio engineers of today feel the need to compress an entire album to a range of a only a fraction of the potential of PCM. My god, there's CLIPPING in modern records, for God's sake. The loudness war on CDs is taking a toll on the quality of modern music. That being said, there is absolutely no reason for vinyl to come back. While it is my perception (this cannot be objectively measured) that vinyl sounds more pleasing to the ears, it is too much of a hassle to maintain it in a proper condition, and the inevitable degradation of the medium and the scratching make it too inconvenient, not to mention that if the mastering of a record is done digitally, the analog conversion loses any advantage it might have had. Conclusion: records from before the use of digital mastering == good. After that == waste of your time and money.
I prefer it any day to pops and crackles. Also I'm tired of flipping that damn record over or having to get up to put on a new one on because the last one only held one song on each side. No one can hear the difference and after several play throughs the grooves become worn and you lose the quality on records.
Can I bum a sig?
Actually, CDs technically have a higher dynamic range than Vinyl, its just that the labels are in a constant competition to see who can make their CD the loudest...
Indie used to be independant record labels, now it means you wear tight jeans, vintage clotes and have a mod haircut, whilst listening to sh*t like the jam, arctic monkeys, razorlite, the rakes, the paddingtons, the kooks and a variety of other sh*t.
He's referring to Audio Level Compression which is the ACTUAL reason behind the mutilation of today's music quality. (But can also be a great tool if not abused) For example, pull up a Linkin Park song in Audacity. Notice how the waveform pretty much just fills the whole darn spectrum up with blue? That's compression :)
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding floating around of Nyquist's Theorem and the definition of "range of audible sound". There's also this apparent myth that recording engineers get to capture sound waves straight out of the air and spit them out of your stereo on a 1:1 basis when they use vinyl. It's a bit odd on a site that's as generally objective and science-minded as /.
CD/DVDs introduced a problem. The ability to create perfect copies.
The RIAA/MPAA rely on consumers purchasing copies when theirs break. They don't want consumers to have the ability to make an exact copy of the data because this destroys their enforced rarity of the medium.
DRM in digital (lossless) media, such as in Blu-Ray, has progressed to the point that the BD-ROM is essentially analog -- Thanks to many artificial/legal restrictions, you "cannot" make a perfect copy of the data. I've consoled myself with such DRM by thinking, "Well, now it's like we're back to vinyl again. One copy, and if it breaks I need to buy a new one." This way of thinking has actually made DRM much easier to swallow.
The culmination of DRM is analog.
Any digital format will trounce analog as far as noise floor goes. That's a given. The question is whether that's the most important attribute you want in your music. After having owned a turntable for about 6 months and properly calibrating it, I claim it is not.
But, as I said previously, neither medium can effectively reproduce the entire frequency range. The PCM format on CDs need to recurr to several filters for effective reproduction of the music, and you still won't be able to draw a square wave. This is not to say vinyl is superior, but it's not a point that can be touted as an absolute advantage.
The problem with these comparisons is that they depend on your personal listening experience, and from there on everything from the brand of you stylus to record wear on LPs and the DAC quality of a CD player can affect sound.
In my case, whether it's an artifact or not I do not know, however the stereo separation in LPs seems a lot more realistic to me, and the presentation of the music too. My personal experience was with A "Ballads of the Beatles" LP, which featured "Yesterday". I can tell you that the vinyl version, in an ABX test with a friend, absolutely wiped the floor with the compared FLAC file from the corresponding CD rip.
Is that an absolute determination that vinyl is superior? Certainly not. But like Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it IS good". If the stereo separation and the perceived higher fidelity of the guitars and citars in a Beatles album on LP is better than its other versions, it IS better. TO ME. That's the key.
But like I said, record wear and inconvenience don't cut it for new releases, so it's FLACs and CDs for me now.
In addition, if you sample at 44.1Khz and there is a signal with a frequency above that, it's not filtered out - it will get aliased down to 44.1Khz - freq. So you need the analog filtering before the sampling to prevent this. And analog filtering always has a rolloff, it is not infinitely sharp (a consequence of the Kramers-Kronig relation - a step cutoff filter will respond to a unit impulse before it is applied.)
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I believe you meant that Vinyl prices have gone up due to the weakness of the dollar. Not its strength. If the dollar were strong, imported goods would be cheaper, not more expensive.
Speaking of a double blind test, do one. Let me know how it goes. There is not a SINGLE scientific, peer-reviewed study that says humans can discern CD "distortions". Show me a single study that says ANY human can discern a sound from vinyl and a CD recording of that vinyl.
You experience means nothing. People will believe in all kinds of fantastical things that are not true. If it is so obvious, show me a test result.
Well, that's the whole point isn't it? What you BELIEVE is not necessarily true.
It makes perfect sense...
A lot of things makes perfect sense when you first hear it; world is flat, intelligent design, psychic abilities, etc... Just because it makes "sense" does not make it so. Otherwise, you would be able to demonstrate it in a repeatable test.
Waving your data around isn't going to change anyone's opinion,
If you ignore facts when it does not fit your "reality", then that is really YOUR problem, not his.
Vinyl is physically a limited format, and not any amount of romanticism is going to change that.
I've got a nice green pen that will greatly improve the quality of your CDs. All you have do is color the edges or the cd. This absorbing the scattered red laser light and improves the sound quality.
;)
Ha! Funny! Almost as good as the wooden volume knob that improves sound quality, or triphasers (some insanely over priced in-line transformers basically).
It's all that kind of thing that almost makes me ashamed to call my self an audiophile. Because there are so many people who call them selves that and have NO CLUE. I will admit that most audiophiles think they know a lot more than they acutally do, and buy into crazy ideas for products that will suposedly improve sound quality. I, on the other hand, am an audio purist. I want the shortest, cleanest, most technicaly correct signal path for my system. This means I despise EQ's and capacitors in my audio signal path! But alas, some times they are a necessary evil...
Do you also sell gold plated USB cables, to improve the sound quality of my MP3 files when I copy them to my portable?